During the summer Google conducted an experiment to determine how much of a difference the speed at which a web page loads on the user. We already know that you will lose nearly half your visitors if they have to wait longer than 15 seconds for a page to load & only 5% of visitors will wait longer than 30 seconds. Googles experiment was based on the time it took to return search results.

Over six weeks they slowed the time for the search results to appear from 100 to 400 milliseconds. Doesn’t sound a lot you may think, but it resulted in a daily impact of 0.5% fewer search submissions to those affected. To most websites this wouldn’t make a great deal of difference but to Google it’s huge.

So the speed at which your website loads can make a huge difference to your revenue. If your website is taking longer than 15 seconds to load, you could be losing an awful lot of potential clients. Even when your site loads between 5 – 10 seconds it could make a huge impact on your sales.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) should not only cover the aspects of your website that need help to be seen, crawled & understood by the search engines, but also the website from the clients point of view.

If your website has been optimised , crawled & is appearing well in the search results it doesn’t mean it’s a good site for potential clients to use. We have optimised many sites that appear in the top five for their search category, but they are still not getting any clients. The reasons are nearly always related to how fast they load in the web browser. Some time out & some load but with media components missing. Getting all of the media elements on your web page into a well organised & optimised format is the only way to ensure a fast download time & a good ROI. if you have a very high media content such as pictures or videos, then these can hosted on other servers to enable a faster download time. Websites with lots of pictures in galleries can choose to host their pictures on sites such as “photobucket” , this way helps keep your maximum monthly download limit to a minimum & loads the pictures faster.

If you are experiencing any slow load problems then why not contact us for a free website analysis.

Original Google data in the link below.

For the full report on Googles “Speed Matters”

Many people create their own websites today with one of the many freely available website builder software packages such as Yahoo sitebuilder, iweb, BlueVoda, CoffeeCup, MS Frontpage, Joomla, WordPress etc. & other WYSIWYG, drag & drop software.

They are simple to use & the resulting website page looks great, but quite often they also leave small errors in the HTML code of your website. One missing forward slash “/” or bracket ” ) ” can render the whole page unreadable to a search engine spider.

In a previous blog about search engine spiders we explained how they don’t like incorrectly written code in the page, causing the spider to give up & skip large chunks of your website.

But how can you tell if your website has any errors in it’s code? The best place to start is at the World Wide Web Consortium HTML validation page. Just type your website address into the address bar on the page & it will list the results below.

Having some errors in your code does not spell the end of your website on the internet. Most modern upto date browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari etc. have the computing power to understand what the website code is trying to display & will display it correctly.

But in order for your website to be displayed by a potential client, they need to find it first in the search engine listings. If your site is showing errors, the search engine spiders can’t crawl it & your website won’t be indexed as well as it should. Given the amount of data search engines crawl daily, it’s not surprising they are getting more picky over which sites they crawl.

If you have errors on your website, then why not have a free website analysis at SEO France.

Why wouldn’t you want search engines spiders or robots to search every nook & cranny of your website? Surely the more content it crawls, the more information it has to push your website further up the search results?

Not when comes to pages with calendar scripts. The issue here is that crawlers will generally try to follow every link on your pages unless you tell them not to. Consider the calendar script that allows people to chose a date for an upcoming holiday. Most calendars operate on calculations that determine where the dates and days of the weeks will fall & users can, feasibly, click infinitely into the past or future. Now imagine this calendar being looked at by a Search Engine crawler. The crawler doesn’t think the way a user does. A crawler will just follow the link to the next page of information, in theory it can end up following your calendar into the infinite future.

Of course the crawler at some point will stop. It will know that it has fallen into an infinite loop and cease crawling your site. So what’s the problem? It will just move onto the next part of the page. No, infinite loops can cause crawlers to leave your site. They can also cause them not to index the important content. If they fall into an infinite loop before they index your main content, chances are your content doesn’t get indexed.

What can you do to stop this?…………………robots.txt

In our next blog we will be explaining why you need a robots.txt file, & how you can use it to stop the above happening.

90% of the work we do at SEO France is correcting code in website pages. Many website designers create pages that look good in a browser but overlook the need for valid code. Let us explain a little about the difference between your website looking good in your browser & not so good to search engines.

Browser testing

Testing your web pages in browsers is an absolutely necessary process for building any web page. It allows you to see what others can see, and often you will notice mistakes in your HTML code because of the symptoms they cause in browsers. But what about when your testing browser(s) display the pages exactly as you intended. Are your pages error-free? Not necessarily.

HTML validation

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets the standards for coding HTML and CSS for web pages. They also provide tools to validate your code for free. So do some third-parties. The question you might be asking is, “if my page looks fine in Internet Explorer, Netscape, Safari, Firefox, etc. why do I need to worry about validation?” If all you’re looking is for proper display, you might not have to at all. However, if you’re concerned with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) validating your HTML is an absolute must.

Search engine spiders

One reason for this is the difference between spiders and browsers. Spiders “crawl” the web indexing web pages and their content. They are basically stripped-down web browsers that aren’t concerned with displaying for a user but with recognising content. In other words, Search Engine spiders are looking at the same code your web browsers is and parsing it in a very similar way.

This difference in functionality, however, can be vast. There is a very real pressure on web browser developers to ensure that their browsers display pages correctly to the user. This often includes forgiving what is perceived to be errors in the code. Improperly nested elements, unclosed tags, badly formed tables – these are all errors in HTML code that might not effect your web page’s display in your favorite browser. When it comes to Search Engine spiders, however, it can be an entirely different story.

That is not to say that small errors in your HTML code will bury your website in the Search Engine rankings. Certainly they won’t normally make your page invisible to spiders. They can, however, disrupt the vastly important process of a spider parsing your page for all relevant content or make some of that content invisible. The more errors you have in your code the less likely you are of having all of your page or site crawled.

What is SMO?

The most popular social media sites that can help your business are sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter etc., as well as the various blogs and forums around the net. The idea is for a business to solidify its image on the net and build up a community. You can now promote your business through RSS feeds, images and videos, news buttons, blogs, podcasts, forums and just about anything you can think of. The concept of viral marketing is closely linked to social media networking.

Unlike traditional search engine marketing, social media optimisation has a dual focus. Not only does it aim to drive traffic to a site through the social media networks themselves, it also aims to boost a site’s ranking by getting mentions all over the web. This is why social media optimisation is currently considered a smart way to optimise.

Social media optimisation is important not just for your SEO strategy, but also for your business to manage its online reputation. As more people come to rely on the internet for social interaction as well as a source for information. Social media can be used to manage an online reputation by direct interaction with consumers.

The downsides? Social media networking can take up a lot of time. Constant updates are the key to success, both with search engine attention and with the participants in your network. Some sites, such as Twitter, require daily or even hourly participation to really catch people’s attention. Furthermore, if you want to optimise your social media campaign properly, it’s a good idea to get the experts at SEO France on board.

You can pursue social media on your own, but it is important that your social media optimisation campaign meshes well with your search engine optimisation strategy. The idea is to create a single brand image that solidifies your company’s role in the social world of the internet. Talk us at SEO France for advice on how to integrate social media optimisation into your strategy, and how to best pursue social media networking.

Meta tags are snippets of code in the head section of your webpage. They include items such as title, description, keywords, rating, language etc.

<title>Title of your web page</title>
<meta name=”Description” content=”Description of the current webpage.” />
<meta name=”Keywords” content=”Keywords relevant to the current webpage” />

These tags are not viewed on your webpage it self, but are used by internet browsers & search engines. The tags explain which language the site is in, the title of the site, a brief description of that particular pages contents, which keywords are relevant to the page etc.

I recently trawled through the code of 30 websites, all in the same market & in the same area. All had errors in the meta tags.

<meta name=”Description content=”Description of the current webpage. />

<meta name=”Description” content=”Description of the current webpage.” >

<meta name=”Description” content=Description of the current webpage. />

All three of these description meta tags are wrong. By having the tags they believed they were getting their sites crawled better by the search engines. But because of the errors they were infact being penalised by the search engines.

So do “meta tags” really matter? Will they help your page rank in the organic listings?

The answer is, yes. But only if the meta tag code is correct. If not you are more likely to cause harm to your page rank & find that your site never appears high in the listings.

Over the next few months we will be giving SEO tips for people looking at optimising their own sites.